They were two days out of Tzurfaera, winding their way northwest towards Raesidae, when the wind rose and lifted the tops of the hills and sent them howling through the narrow wadis. Cloedeya stopped the wagons and turned them to block the wind, and he and Taeyaho struggled to pull the cloth screen across the space between them, providing a meager roof. They brought the horses and the milk cow into this shelter, and the stood between their legs, bleating unhappily. The chickens were brooding securely in their coop. Melsa and Big Praeda and Manrie went up and down the ladders to the wagon roofs, carrying the potted herbs and vegetables to safety. Then the people of the caravan climbed into the wagons and shut the doors.

Uku was with them, and Tafaemi. Uku because he was wanted, and Tafaemi because Cloedeya was kind. For two days they sheltered within the wagons, only going out to check the animals and relieve themselves, or to switch wagons, so that no one had to endure Tafaemi for very long. Melsa couldn’t stand her, and could not hide her resentment when she was made to shift back into the sleeping wagon, which Tafaemi never moved from. But Cloedeya eased the tempers of the others by telling stories and inviting their own stories, and the time passed.

“Being from the Library in Libreigia, you must know all about the Horse of Ibimendi. Perhaps you have an entry for it in your book?”

Manrie was seated with her back to the wall that faced the storm, and she could feel the grit striking the boards. Little Praeda was in her lap, playing with an onion doll. The smell of onion drifted upwards, and Tafaemi was pinching her nose against it, while, at the same time, trying to get the little girl’s attention. She had become enamored with Praeda, and was always trying to hug and pet her. Praeda would have none of it. She fled into Manrie or Uku’s arms whenever Tafaemi came close, but Uku was rarely in the sleeping wagon, so it was mostly Manrie that she clung to. Uku was spending the days filling half of the pantry wagon with his enormous body, curling himself up tightly, to try to make room for the others to sit and work. Perhaps he had tried to make himself small in similar ways, when he was growing too large to serve in the library anymore.

“I don’t,” Manrie said in reply to Cloedeya’s question.

“Nor should you,” he said. “The Horse wasn’t a monster. It was a horse, like our two unfortunate draft horses, who are being so patient during this storm.”

“We should bring them inside,” Little Praeda said.

“Silly girl!” Tafaemi squealed, trying to tease her. “Then *we* couldn’t fit!”

Cloedeya ignored them and went doggedly on. “The story goes that Lehtahnbin found the horse, a few years after we came through the Door at Hasra. It was the first creature of this world that was kind to us. It was grazing along the Dihtusahlobo River when Lehtahnbin went there to fish. There are many stories of Lehtahnbin. He is said to have fed our ancestors throughout our first years in the land, as he was adept with snares and traps and spear fishing. There were many dangers then as now, and at first many of the fish he caught and much of the game he trapped was poisonous. Do you know, Little Praeda, that our hair was very drab when we came through the Door? Now it glitters like precious metals, and this is because of the food that the land provided. Only many died from eating during those first years, but never Lehtahnbin. His stomach was very strong, and it is good that he had many children.”

Manrie couldn’t help interjecting. “It is a popular story, but the Archivist of the Second Tower says that it isn’t true.”

Cloedeya laughed. “Scholars always argue with the truth of anything. They are great fabricators and story-tellers, and the stories they tell always make them and the people of their own time seem like the wisest and cleverest people who have ever lived.”

“Some of them are very honest,” Manrie objected, and Cloedeya saw that he had offended her.

“Some are,” he agreed. “But even our curiosity can be warped by our need. Never mind. Lehtahnbin found the horse, or maybe it found him. He was already far from Hasra, and he was alone, but he followed the horse when it set off to the south. It went slowly, and often looked back at him, to make sure that he was following it. When sleep overtook him, it waited patiently a few steps away. When hunger found him, it led him to apple trees and mushroom patches and wild onions. He followed it for many days. It was teaching him how to eat in the land, and he remembered everything. They say that in the Previous World, some creatures do not eat meat, but every horse I know has enjoyed a fish or a rabbit from time to time. Lehtahnbin hunted for the horse, and when he caught some strange creature he would know if it was safe to eat if the horse ate it.

“They were friends for many years. Eventually the horse came north and led Lehtahnbin back to Hasra. His friends rejoiced to see him, for they thought that he had died and left them with his many children to feed. In truth, few of his friends were still alive, as the monsters had killed many, and many had been starved or poisoned. But he taught them what the horse had taught him, and people began to thrive in the land. He stayed only as long as the horse stayed, and then he followed it south again. When he returned years later, he told the growing colony that the horse had died at a gap in the mountains. It had lain down on a hillside and looked at him for a long time as it died, and he had sat and stared into its mournful eyes, and fed it little pieces of a sweet crow that he had trapped, and kissed it when the last breath left its body. He put a marker there, and when his descendants came to the mountain pass they found it standing among a grove of fruiting aspen trees, which is still there. The Grove of Ibimendi. Have you seen it?”

“We went there once,” Manrie said.

“So did we,” Cloedeya continued, after waiting a moment for her to tell the story. “We were allowed to pick some of the fruit, which is, of course, not fruit at all, but the chrysalis of the mountain butterfly, which returns again and again to the grove to build a new cocoon and emerge with different wings. The tenders of the grove told us that only one kind of chrysalis is safe to eat, and that we had arrived at a fortunate time, as this delicacy, known as the oyakhuna, had just been found dangling from a high branch. Usually it is reserved for the Matriarch of Ibimendi, but that good lady suffers from dyspepsia, and was very grateful for a broth that we made her, which eased her symptoms. She rewarded us with the chrysalis. We still have it. We grate some of the fibers from the cocoon into our most delicate soups, and only rarely. The butterfly inside it will never emerge. Like the Horse of Ibimendi, it seems content to let us eat.”

Little Praeda was looking at her doll with suspicion, as if afraid that the onion bulb it had for a head would break open, and an insect would emerge. Tafaemi opened her silly mouth to prattle about something, but Manrie forestalled her. “I think I’ve seen it. In that yellow sack that hangs beside the dried fish.” Cloedeya nodded, but something in his expression made her wish she hadn’t said it. Was he afraid that Tafaemi might try to steal it, now that she knew its value. To cover her mistake, Manrie asked, “What is that bat in the brown sack that hangs beside it? The one with four wings?”

Cloedeya and Melsa exchanged a look. “It is two bats, actually,” Melsa said.

A drawing from the bestiary flashed across Manrie’s mind. “Not the okubrahchi?”

“What’s an okubratti?” Little Praeda asked.

“Okubrahchi. It’s a bat that mates for life. If you eat it,” she found herself blushing and finished lamely, “well, you’ll be in love.”

“Or more in love,” Cloedeya said softly, looking at Melsa.

Melsa cleared her throat. “We went west after Ibimendi,” she said, changing the subject. “Do you remember, Cloedeya? How we followed that mountain butterfly through the pass, and it never once made a cocoon to change its shape?”

“It led us through the Sand Hills,” Cloedeya agreed, smiling.

“Yes, and then it disappeared, but you kept claiming that you saw it, flitting off to the west. All because you wanted to see what was beyond the plains.”

“Well, it was worth it, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, but all those days of eating antelope and agorabehn. And you insisted we try the grass lizards, and the locusts, and the breathing wheat. We didn’t have the Horse of Ibimendi with us. We could have died.”

“We had Big Praeda with us, and she makes everything sweet.”

Big Praeda was in the pantry wagon, no doubt napping or listening to the storm or talking with Uku. Perhaps they were making lunch. Manrie was getting hungry. Tafaemi was staring at her, a naked, hungry look that seemed very close to anguish. An embarrassing look. Manrie wished that she hadn’t mentioned the okubrahchi.

Melsa made her particular gesture with her wide shoulders, swinging them back and forth as if she wanted to fan the story into life. “Do you remember the man we met? He was coming from the west. He had that wide hat.”

“He was a strange one,” Cloedeya agreed. “He ate all of our potatoes. Ate them raw. He wouldn’t let me cook them.”

“And he was leading that turtle on a leash. He claimed that the turtle nursed him, that he survived on its milk. I didn’t think that turtles gave milk, but this one did. From dugs on the side of its eyes. So that it could stare at its young as they fed, he said.”

“I remember that the milk was very bitter and made you throw up. Even Big Praeda couldn’t sweeten it. I doubt that it was really milk. More a poison to be sprayed in a predator’s face.”

Melsa shivered. “I still say that he was in love with that beast. It was unnatural, the way he cooed over it and petted it.”

Tafaemi, who had been reaching across to stroke Praeda’s hair, arrested the motion of her hand. Instead she felt at her face with the tips of her fingers, as if assuring herself that it was still there. She pinched the skin beside her eyes, seemingly worried that she might have sprouted nipples on her brow.

“After that we met Taeyaho,” Cloedeya said.

“Really?” Manrie asked, surprised.

“Really. He was all alone, wandering through the grasses. He was naked when we met him.”

“But where did he come from?”

“He’s never said. We weren’t even sure that he could speak, at first. But then he started singing.”

Manrie frowned. “Like he sang in Tzurfaera?”

Cloedeya measured her with a look. “That was a new song. He’s very good at making up songs.”

“Cloedeya,” Manrie said. “I still have one disc.”

“When we get to Raesidae,” he told her.

“But if it works, we need to go east. Back to the Man on the Mountain. He has stacks and stacks of them.”

“We don’t know if it was the lace hole. If the discs need a lace hole.”

“We could sell them for a great fortune,” Tafaemi said.

“No, we couldn’t,” Cloedeya told her.

Melsa continued her story, to cover the awkwardness that followed this exchange. “We would have just kept going west, if we hadn’t come to the bank of the great river.”

“What river?” Manrie asked.

“Far to the west, there is a river that you can’t see across. You might think it was an ocean, or a lake, if not for the rush of the water. It tumbles down and roars over rocks, only Cloedeya said that they must be mountains. Mountains beneath the river. It is so loud that at first we couldn’t hear each other. We had to shout and shout. And then, somehow, we learned to hear above it.”

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“There were flat turtles that rode the current,” Cloedeya said. “Not like the turtle that followed the man in the hat. Their meat was so flavorful that it made all the other flavors on the plate seem dull and uninteresting. They could only be eaten by themselves.”

“And there were birds that flew across, from the unseen bank. When we cooked them, they tasted like honey and cinnamon.”

“And there were the stones that crawled. When we heated them in a fire and spread dough across them, the dough bubbled into geometric patterns. Beautiful to look at it, but it tasted like rotting fish.”

“That’s where we met the crone and the little girl.”

“Little girl?” Praeda asked.

“Older than you,” Melsa told her. “Both the old woman and the girl shared a name. What was it, Cloedeya?”

“Bihazaila. They claimed to have come from the other side of the river. When we expressed doubt that anyone could cross it, they said that people could in their own time. We asked what time they came from, and they said that at some future moment people will cross the river, and there will be colonies there. That first there will be great empires that will rise and fall, and a time of pestilence, and times of famine. That there will be wars and revolts, and much misery. But people will survive. We will cross that river.”

“Did they come through a lace hole?” Manrie asked.

“No,” Cloedeya told her. “They had hourglasses. Each of them. And they showed us the boat they had come on, and it had hooks for the hourglasses on the prow and stern. They stayed with us one evening, and ate what we cooked for them, and then, as the fire was dying down, they turned their hourglasses over and disappeared.”

“Taeyaho made a song for them,” Melsa said, “but I doubt he remembers it. He never remembers his songs.”

“Where is Taeyaho?”

Cloedeya looked around, as if surprised that the boy wasn’t with them. “He’s probably out in the storm. Don’t worry,” he said, when Manrie tensed with alarm. “He often goes out in the storms. He finds dens and caves to hide in. He loves us, but he cannot stand these close quarters for very long.”

Tafaemi simpered. “He always seems quite content in my arms.”

“You are the mother he never had,” Melsa said acidly.

“I’m not old enough to be his mother,” Tafaemi told her, and Melsa snorted.

“Cloedeya?” Manrie asked. “How did you know that. About what our hair was like, in the Previous World?”

He frowned, trying to remember. “I think that the man with the turtle told us. Yes, that’s right. As he was eating all of our potatoes. He said that they would make his copper hair verdigris. Apparently he desired that. It must be why I thought of it, just now.”

“He was not the strangest person we’ve ever met,” Melsa said.

“No?” Cloedeya asked. “Who was stranger?”

Melsa thought, swinging her shoulders back and forth. “The man in the peach grove?”

Cloedeya chuckled. “Yes. He was strange. He claimed that the witch had cursed him seventeen times, and that every day he had to live with a different curse, round and round in a cycle, starting all over again on the eighteenth day. Mostly the curses had to do with the peaches.”

Melsa was smiling again. For some reason this story brought the shy quiver back into her voice. “One day he had to mash the peaches and cover his chest with the pulp. And then the next day he had to count his collection of peach pits all day long. And on another day he had to stay up in the trees, and couldn’t let his feet touch the ground.”

“A terrible life,” Tafaemi said with relish.

“Maybe,” Cloedeya said, “but I came to doubt that he was cursed at all.”

“Why wasn’t he cursed?” Little Praeda asked.

“The witch may be real. But I’ve never seen her. And I’ve met many people who say that she’s cursed them, as an excuse for their bad behavior. There was that man who went about pinching everyone. And all the people in his village tolerated it, because they said he was cursed. But you could see the delight in his malicious little eyes. His ‘curse’ was his excuse for doing whatever he wanted to do.”

Cloedeya was looking across at Tafaemi as he said this, and Manrie watched her face flush with outrage. She might have said something if the wind hadn’t picked up at that moment and sent a blast of sand rattling against the wagon wall. *Cloedeya would never make her go out in the storm,* Manrie thought, *but she thinks that he would.* She felt a strange pity for Tafaemi in that moment, and remembered her saying that no one ever loved her in the way that she wanted to be loved. Her own son had been happy to see her go, or at least had declined to come with her. Her beauty could not protect her from abandonment and loneliness.

Manrie shifted Little Preada off of her lap. “I have to answer a call of nature,” she said.

Cloedeya cradled Praeda and began to tell another story, illustrating it with small images made by twisting the hairs on the onion doll. Manrie slid the side of the wagon open just wide enough to roll under it, but even so Tafaemi gave a shriek of protest as sand and grit blew in. Manrie pulled the door shut behind her and fumbled for her neck cloth, pulling it up over her mouth and nose. She shaded her eyes with a protective hand and tried to look into the storm. Skirls of sand twisted up from the hills and spun through the air. But the storm seemed to be lessening, after that last great gust. She pulled up her robes and squatted and felt the sharp prick of blown debris against her ankles as she urinated.

A figure moved along a ridge to the northeast, and the stream of her urine cut off abruptly. A figure on a horse, with an oddly shaped head. A muslin wrapped head. It seemed to look at her, indifferent to the slicing sand. Then it turned the horse and disappeared over the ridge.

She pushed out the last flow of urine and stood quickly, turning. She saw that Uku was facing her on the other side of the animals, standing in the opposite gap between the wagons, his large body creating a windbreak for the cow and horses. The wind from the south was incredibly fierce. It moved up the back of his body and lifted his hair. She hesitated, then wound her way between the horses in the tunnel of calm air that he was creating.

She came up to him and shouted “Did you see her?”

“See who?”

“Raeflin! The Bounty Hunter!” the storm seemed to snatch her words away and sent them skirling over the hills.

“I closed my eyes. To give you privacy. Repose. Ease.” His low voice was barely audible amid the scratch and tumble of the wind.

“How long have you been out here?”

“I don’t know. I came out to relieve myself, and became frightened for the animals. The beasts. The menagerie.”

“And you’ve just been standing here, saying words to yourself?”

He gave a wincing grin. “It passes the time.”

She found herself stepping closer to him and placing her head against the top of his stomach. He was surprisingly warm, and smelled of the wind, and like a different kind of dust, the kind that collected on books and scrolls. Did people carry the scent of the past with them throughout their lives? Did she smell of ink and lairs and snared rabbits?

“Why is she following us?” she asked into his billowing robes.

He was silent for a minute, then said, “I only met her once. When Laenrid came to the gate. She named him for me. So that I would go and try to kill him.”

“Yes. She makes other people do things for her.”

“Then she must want us to go and do something for her. One of us,” he said.

She moved her face so that she could kiss his stomach through his robes. She didn’t know why she did so. He didn’t seem to notice. Perhaps the grit pummeling his back distracted him from all other sensations. “I won’t,” she said. “I won’t do what she wants me to do. I’m not her slave.”

A shiver crossed the massive body. “I am not a slave either. A man who said that slavery was wrong still owned me for seven months. He then sold me to the tanning yards, to ease his conscience.”

She placed her ear against his stomach and could hear the rattle of stones against his back. “My master was kind,” she said. He made no response. She lifted her head and looked up at him. His eyes were closed. “Won’t you come inside? I could turn the horses, so that their faces will be protected.”

“The wind is dying, the storm will end soon.”

She darted her face forward and kissed his belly again. “I’ll bring you food.”

“I must hold my hands to the sides of the wagons.”

“I’ll feed you.”

Big Praeda was mincing ham in the pantry wagon. She lifted a large platter to shield it from the wind as Manrie came in. Her bluish lips quirked into a smile. “Have you and Uku changed places? I didn’t think he could fit in the sleeping wagon, with everyone else.”

“He’s creating a wind break for the horses.”

Big Praeda frowned. “Creating it how?”

“With his body.”

The older woman considered, then nodded. “He wants punishment.”

“For what?”

“For not being there to protect his people.”

“But how could he have been? He was enslaved.”

“Many people blame themselves for their distress. It is easier than saying plainly that there are things that are outside of our control. Fetch the little pot of mustard, please. And that stale bread. We can crumb it and make a salad. Pluck some parsley. And cut some celery.”

Manrie moved among the pots carefully, stepping gingerly so as not to knock them over. When she brought the round loaf of stale bread to Big Praeda, she said, “I wasn’t born a slave, you know.”

The older woman glanced up at her. The blue lips fell into a placid smile, inviting her confidences. A large boil had burst high on her cheek, and the healing skin was greenish-gray in the shadows of the wagon. On the other side of the far wall, the chickens rustled in their coop, barely audible above the kick of stone and sand against the wagon.

“We were clients of one of the first families in Akahvihl,” Manrie said. “Good clients. My father was a miller. Which is why the bandits killed him, when the famine had been going on for two years. People always thought that a miller must have bread, even though they knew that there was no grain for him to mill. The bandits killed him, and my brothers, and they raped my mother.”

Big Praeda’s chapped hands never stopped mincing the ham. “How old were you?” she asked.

“I was five. Haerzarin Ahntal said that we should join him. Everyone was leaving, and our patrons were dead. The Ahntals took our clientage, more out of charity than anything else, and they led us with the rest of our people from the town. We were part of the great migration, the starving people who went west. After a few days we joined a caravan. Only it was a caravan with no trade goods. Just people who could barely walk, who shared what little food they had as generously as they could. The bandits would come and kill some of us, but they knew that we had nothing, and they mostly left us alone. Aizdha was traveling with that caravan. He had gotten so thin that I didn’t know that he was really a fat man. He had gone east, with many other scholars, searching for the cause of the famine. He showed me pictures of blight flies and worm locusts that he had drawn in the bestiary. It was the first time I ever saw it. The bestiary, I mean. He was impressed that I could read. I became his assistant, and my mother would watch us. I don’t think she intended to protect me, if he showed himself to be a bad man. I think that she was only wondering what she could get out of it.

“When we reached Libreigia, she came to him and asked him to buy me from her. He said that he would take me as an apprentice, but she insisted that I should be his slave. Then he said that he would take us both in, that we could live with him. But she refused this, as well. I think that she hated me, because I had lived, and was a little child, and found ways to be happy when everyone else was very sad. She wanted me to be a slave.”

“And yet you took her name. When you first joined us,” Big Praeda said.

Manrie found herself blushing. Her hands worked at the bread, scraping crumbs into a bowl. “I couldn’t think of another woman’s name.”

“Where is she now?”

“She’s dead. She threw herself from the walls when I was nine years old. She had become a prostitute, and was often abused. But she would come, sometimes, to stare up at Aizdha’s room. He would take food down to her, but she wouldn’t eat it.” The metal rasp scraped against the hard loaf. “I was glad when she died.”

Big Praeda held out a hand and Manrie gave her the bowl of crumbs. “It is why I don’t stay in the sleeping wagon, when they’re telling stories,” the older woman said. “It makes me think of my own stories. I will not remember them.”

“You can choose not to remember?”

“Like I can choose my own name.”

“But aren’t you afraid that it will return to you? The past?”

“That is what a story is. The return of the past.” She began to mix the ham and the mustard and the herbs she had torn into the bowl of crumbs. She broke an egg into the mixture.

“Cloedeya and Melsa were telling stories about the caravan. About your travels.”

The bluish lips twisted in a small smile. “Those are the stories I like. But I won’t tell them. No habit of storytelling for me. Here, this is done. You can take it across. I am going to slice some tomatoes and cucumbers for another salad. Come back to get the bowls and spoons. And, Manrie, cover it before you go out.”

Manrie tied a cloth over the bowl, but made sure that it was loose. Outside the storm was, indeed, dying down. Uku raised his head to her. “Victuals,” he said. “Provender, sustenance, nourishment.”

She had forgotten a spoon. She fed him with her fingers, feeling the touch of his warm lips against her skin. He looked into her eyes as she did so, and she felt a flush come over her body. She could imagine the wind dying, and his large hands slipping from the sides of the wagons to clasp her. To distract herself, she thought of the bestiary. And wondered if she were creating the wrong book. Perhaps she should be recording the stories of the dead. She was not like Big Praeda. She could not tolerate the idea of stories being lost or forgotten. Even her mother’s story. She had hated her mother, but now she wished that she knew some story about her. About her youth, or her marriage, or what she was like as a young mother. All she knew was the great sadness that had afflicted that strange and distant woman. Perhaps she couldn’t avoid adding people to Aizdha’s book. Her book. Who else did it belong to, now?

Uku nodded at the bowl. “The others must eat.” Manrie was surprised to see how much of its contents had gone.

“Big Praeda is making more. I’ll bring you more.”

He nodded, but in that moment a ray of sunlight fell across his head. Manrie glanced up and saw a patch of clear sky. The storm was moving off.